One of the pleasures of the winter holidays is the time it affords to read materials other than the obligatory academic journals and students’ term papers. This year, like every year, most major magazines I caught up with published a review of 2010. I avoid reading those reviews because I already experienced those events (I did not like them much then!).

The major magazines also attempt to forecast the more salient issues of 2011 and some of their guesses are pretty good while others are pretty ridiculous. If they can do that, fearing no shame, why can’t I?

So what is the Tao of 2011? Chinese astrology tells us that on February 3, 2011 the Year of the Rabbit will begin. The I Ching says that in “the year of the Rabbit without concentration you will fail.” So watch what you are doing, focus on your intent, don’t go looking both ways, except when crossing a street.

Heeding the rabbit’s caution and remembering Yogi Berra’s uncertainty about predictions and, because my business is higher education, I thought I would suggest ten events that are likely to have a significant effect upon higher education in the United States in 2011. Here it goes.

Number One: Early in 2011 cities and states that are broke now, operating with deficits, and projecting deficits through 2012, will begin to either default or furiously renegotiate their outstanding bonds. Because colleges and universities that borrow do so with tax-free bonds under the authority of their state, their bonds’ perceived risk will be lumped with the “municipals” and it will cost substantially more to borrow money for anything. At the same time, state’s contribution to higher education is expected to decline, precisely when demand from 18-24 year olds is projected to grow sharply (fueled in part by the nature of this recovery). This will exacerbate the financial issues already being faced by the whole of higher education, from decreased state contributions for public universities, to tapped-out Federal pools for loans and new requirements for additional reserves for private universities. This will lead to a new musical hit, maybe a country western or blues or more rightly a rap, on how being a CFO of a college or university in 2011 “ain’t nothing but pain.”

Number Two: In 2011, the Feds will continue their attempt to push the Capitalized Universities (CUs) further away from the educational trough. The Federal case has been weakened by the revelations that the GAO study which gave it impetus did not live up to its title: “FOR-PROFIT COLLEGES Undercover Testing Finds Colleges Encouraged Fraud and Engaged in Deceptive and Questionable Marketing Practices.” The GAO was forced to send corrections on critical data presented to Congress. Nonetheless, a series of changes in government regulations applying mainly or only to CUs and new legislation now in Congress, will move forward to limit the use of CUs business model for attracting students. The Feds will hurt CUs in the short term with lower sales and lower profits, but this will only serve to make the CUs a stronger competitor and cause it to move into more of the Traditional Universities’ (TUs) traditional areas. The CUs will successfully adapt, the TUs will need another strategy.

Number Three: Some universities will have no choice but to raise tuition and students will respond adversely to those attempts. For universities, the cost of tuition has been a proxy for quality, i. e., the higher the tuition the better the college is perceived. This has worked to their advantage as they tried to maintain services while costs rose and state contributions declined. But for students and other payers, higher tuition means higher debt burdens. I predict that this year students will react like their European counterparts and provide political pushback. (See Hell No We Won’t Go and Off with their heads.)

Number Five: An aging faculty and administrative staff will bring about a wave of retirements this year. Most of us are running on super lean staffs so the retirements will require new hires (projected at 15-18 percent) however budgets will constrain replacing all vacancies. Will universities know how to reallocate funds for new hires so as to reflect their strategic objectives? I don’t think most will or can. Lack of a robust faculty pipeline, particularly in areas of high need, such as health professions, engineering, basic sciences, will push starting salaries up? 15-20 percent for faculty and 20-25 percent for administrative roles. This will be partially ameliorated by a willingness for faculty who could retire, to remain on the job

Number Six: Some major universities will begin to use Bologna processes successfully. The Tuning Process will expand and be supported by regional accreditation agencies. The 3-year baccalaureate will be proposed and will become available from traditional state universities, just to overcome increases in “time to completion” which has the average student taking 5-plus years to complete a baccalaureate in the U.S. today. (See here)

Number Seven: While somewhat attenuated by the tight financial picture, this will be the year for venturing abroad. A campus abroad will be initiated by dozens of universities and expanded for those already present.. Data will drive the movement. India will require an additional 5 million professional degreed people in 2012. China will add 7 million to the demand by 2013. But here at home, by the year 2020, President Obama wants us to produce 23 million more graduates than we are producing now. Most attempts will not succeed and will distract from the main business of a TU in the United States. Heed the caution of the rabbit and remember that “without concentration you will fail” (Look up my thoughts on global strategy, part 1, 2 and 3)

Number Eight: We will require a massive improvement in productivity, in order to meet our own need in the U.S., and this is not likely to happen this year. When budgets go south, CU’s cut back and get more done with fewer people. TUs can do that only to a very limited extent. They can restructure programs, close some, open others, make them leaner, faster, delivered through media. Nearly all universities will attempt to increase productivity, but their level will remain stubbornly at that of the 1950’s when no one had ever heard of a computer.

Number Nine: Regional accrediting bodies and other regulators will tighten their reviews to meet social pressure to show outcomes. “Quality”, now a noun, will become a verb. As it was in the 70’s that the noun “impact” became the verb[1] “impacting.” talking about quality in higher education will become so commonplace that “quality” the noun will metamorphise. But what will the new word be? Quality-ing?

Number ten: Seven of the ten predictions above will unfold just as I predict. Three will not. At this time, I can’t tell which will be which, but a predicted .700 batting average ain’t bad.

European college students are members of an umbrella organization consisting of 44 national student unions from 37 countries representing more than 11 million students. The ESU serves as the students’ voice within the European Union’s Bologna Process and most importantly the Bologna Follow-Up Group, which is something like the accountability group keeping the Process honest. The ESU members, of course, do not always reach a consensus on issues but they do speak with one voice. That voice has belonged to a Romanian student Ligia Deca, their Chairperson for the past two years.

The seminal organization, created in 1982, changed its name to ESU and rose to prominence in 2002 to consolidate several national student unions. In the United States, the American Student Union started in the Depression Era. Historically, students were united on ideological grounds for the purpose of opening academia to dissent (mostly from the left). In 1946, the organization evolved into The U.S. Student Association with a more mainstream agenda. ESU is a mixture of the two. Based in Brussels, the ESU lobbies the European Community, just as the U.S. Student Association in D.C. lobbies the U.S. Government, but the ESU effectively represents the diverse political and ideological causes of their constituency.

One of the major concerns of ESU (and reflected as one of Bologna’s Goals) is to make higher education more “student-centered” which they express as: “teaching should no longer be seen as a ‘one way process’ from teacher to learner. Real education can only come about through ‘discussion, projects and challenging the critical mind’.

Student-centered learning is therefore about students as ‘active participants’ in the classroom, as partners who contribute to reaching the required outcomes of a course or programme.” This belief that learning is achieved through the collaborative efforts between both faculty and students may not be accepted by those faculty members claiming learning as their exclusive domain.

There’s nothing radical or unreasonable in the student’s request to have the faculty involve them in their own learning. As a professor, I am sold on the idea and practice it in all my courses. Alarmingly, 70 percent of the European faculty members do not agree that instruction should be student-centered.

In a 2010 survey of their members ESU asked students’ opinion on what should be done about student-centered education in Europe’s universities. Over 75 percent of the students rejected the idea of having national guidelines or accreditation dictate teaching method. Their point of view expressed both their rejection of regulation in general and their recognition that learning is controlled by the faculty member. Yet an impressive 100 percent of the respondents want to have freedom to help choose the content, 80 percent of the students want to be evaluated not just with an exam but on “learning outcomes” and 82 percent want to have a role at evaluating their teachers.

When I began to teach I was told to write down my lecture and read it to the students. That is what my peers did and that’s how I was taught. Fortunately for me the person appointed as my first year mentor was a retired professor who had read Vygotsky and understood that learning was a social experience, an interaction between teacher and student, an open forum where students come to conclusions rather than memorize content.

It is hard to imagine what went wrong, when a people who discovered the basic foundation of student-centered instruction, the Socratic Dialogue, abandoned it. Bologna University was created by students in 1088 as the ultimate student-centered institution. European historians tell us that most of Europe gravitated to teacher-led and content-centered instruction during the Inquisition, established in 1478, perhaps because much of what faculty said, was going to be judged severely. Faculty could not afford dealing with the opinions and questions of students.

I’ve sat in classrooms as an observer in Spain and Italy, and all the classrooms were exclusively teacher-led. Students were evaluated via a single written test and graded on seat time and the ability to remember content.

We don’t have a survey of U.S. students on the same topic but my own undergraduate students tell me that teacher-centered instruction is the norm for them and that reading from a written lecture has been replaced by reading from a Power Point. If you are a teacher you know that it is a lot easier to arrange the experience around you and what you know. But easy is not best. I have yet to be faced with a teaching philosophy, which states that this is the way it should be. It is a practice without a theory so it must be the result of human nature, the individual’s impulse to control their lives and make things easier for themselves.

Student-centered curriculum requires teachers to be awake, to know the curriculum very well and to cultivate the ability of leading by following, as Lau Tsu suggested.

Europe is undergoing a major transformation in higher education and the biggest hurdle is that of creating learning environments out of their teaching environments. No innovation, no 3-year degree, no Tuning or anything else can compare with the benefits Europe would derive from following the students.

ESU’s members believe in large majorities (80 percent or more) that European institutions need a quality improvement system (not a ranking or accreditation system) and that students should be involved in creating these. I give them an A for holding those opinions.

A few days into my first trip to Italy in 1967, I was certain I must have been Italian in a previous life. I enjoyed all the architecture, the design of everything, the attire of both women and men; my conversations with Italians, part verbal and part pantomime, but always vivacious. All my meals seemed to be perfect (even on my reduced budget) and there was never a disappointing dessert or an imperfect cup of espresso. I went to Bologna on my first trip to Italy because I have a special attraction for old university campuses and Bologna’s was the oldest in Europe and the root of all Western higher education.

Bologna University

I was baffled by the urban chaos that reigned inside the “via” loop, which went around the campus. The campus itself was a collage of academic buildings without a logical pattern. One building held the social science department, but economics was in one of the several medical school buildings. Very large lecture rooms, invariably overcrowded, seemed to pour out unto the streets. There were professors carrying on emphatically about something or other and students talking to each other, or trying to pay attention, or furiously taking notes. I returned many times and the feeling was always confirmed, Italy was perfect in all areas but one. It was the most disorganized “organizational culture” I had ever witnessed, whether trying to figure out a traffic pattern, or the dynamics of a lecture hall or the electrical system of a Fiat.

I must confess that when I first heard that the Europeans were re-organizing higher education and had labeled the effort the “Bologna Process” I laughed and did not give it much of a chance to succeed. It was a perfect oxymoron –Bologna and organization—so I never paid much attention. The Bologna Process began in 1999; it involved 29 countries and had an end date of 2010. It had as its goal 6 major objectives which began with the adoption of a system of qualification which they called “readily legible and compatible”, the adoption of a degree system founded upon two cycles, that is a 1st (Baccalaureate) and 2nd level (Master), consolidation of a system of academic credits, promotion of mobility (for students, lecturers, researchers and technical-administrative personnel) and a common method for the assessment of quality. Sure.

Imagine my surprise when in 2001 the Prague Communiqué was made public, resulting from the meeting of European Ministers in charge of higher education. The Prague Communiqué defined the actions to be carried out to achieve the six objectives of the Bologna Process and Ministers reaffirmed their commitment to “the objective of establishing the European Higher Education Area by 2010” and set out three new objectives. In the meantime the number of signatory countries of the Bologna Process had risen to 34. Having some experience with European higher education, their centuries old jealousies and rivalries, the multiplicity of languages, organizational systems, governance and control, etc. etc. etc. I once again predicted it would not get anywhere beyond the plan.

The interesting thing about the Prague Communiqué was in the principles it had adopted unanimously. They were 1) autonomy with accountability, 2) education as a public responsibility, 3) research-based higher education and 4) organizational diversity. The key issues to be dealt with centered on a unified quality system which would be built on “a platform of trust” and which proceeded from a principle of equality. Again, these seemed like insurmountable goals for people who made a career out of denigrating each other’s work.

By 2003 the Berlin Conference of the Bologna Process agreed that higher education was a public good. In a continent filled with aristocracies rather than meritocracies, a “public good” undermined the principle of exclusivity upon which the leading institutions were founded. Surely the thousands of private post-secondary institutions, whose philosophy and existence depended on understanding education as a private good, would object to that and that would be it. Not only that, but at this meeting the Ministers emphasized the fact that in international academic cooperation, academic values should prevail. Private universities aside, the mammoth public universities with their government funds and political governance, could not possibly accept academic values as guiding anything other than the writing of papers. The real power would never be academic; it would always be political, or so I thought.

By 2005 a Quality Assurance system was unveiled and it really looked great. It was announced by the Ministers at the Bergen 2005 meeting that, all European Union countries had adopted the two-cycle system including a 3-year baccalaureate. At this point I began to think this process was proceeding with an unusual amount of reality content. Its achievements over the next two years were downright impressive. They succeeded in allowing grants to be portable (taken from one institution to another) a sure sign that the main article of prestige (who did what research) was being eliminated and the fact that credits earned in one institution would transfer to another without penalty shook my skepticism to its roots. Moreover, the institution of student participation at different decision levels and the promotion of integrated study programs and joint degrees at all academic levels completed my conversion. If they can do this, they will succeed, I conceded.

Finally, the Budapest-Vienna declaration of March of this year made it evident that the Bologna Process had succeeded. Ligia Deca, Chairperson of the European Students Union wrote:

“The turning point of the Bologna Process is the move away from formal implementation towards in- depth mindset changes and re-assessment of the already implemented elements. This involves the full, active participation of the entire academic community, with perhaps a societal debate on the impacts of the Bologna Process in order to raise awareness to its potential and to its benefits, but also to the responsibilities and risks that come with deepening this unprecedented voluntary European-wide agenda.”

Through 11 years of toil and progress, encompassing dozens of government turnovers, the original values were reaffirmed and progress was reported. By the spring of this year 47 countries had joined the process and a declaration was issued which stated:

“We, the Ministers, are committed to the full and proper implementation of the agreed objectives and the agenda for the next decade”, that “in close cooperation with higher education institutions, staff, students and other stakeholders, we will step up our efforts to accomplish the reforms already underway to enable students and staff to be mobile, to improve teaching and learning in higher education institutions, to enhance graduate employability, and to provide quality higher education for all.” “We, the Ministers,” – the Communiqué continued—“recommit to academic freedom as well as autonomy and accountability of higher education institutions as principles of the European Higher Education Area and underline the role the higher education institutions play in fostering peaceful democratic societies and strengthening social cohesion.” These are not mere words, as the concrete actions that accompanied them clearly confirmed.

While faculty and administrators working on their own time and with few resources have made most of these changes, the commitment of resources –putting their money where their communiqué is—has begun to flow to institutions and programs in significant ways. Scholarship and research without national boundaries, exchange of faculty and students as institutional needs and individual preferences required, one-degree system, one transcript, and one interpretation of credits, one quality system of accountability. Incredible.

As an American I would love to see our government affirm and commit as follows:

“We, the Ministers, reaffirm that higher education is a public responsibility. We commit ourselves, notwithstanding these difficult economic times, to ensuring that higher education institutions have the necessary resources within a framework established and overseen by public authorities. We are convinced that higher education is a major driver for social and economic development and for innovation in an increasingly knowledge-driven world. We shall therefore increase our efforts on the social dimension in order to provide equal opportunities to quality education, paying particular attention to underrepresented groups.”

The next meeting will be in Romania in 2012. You can bet I’ll be there.